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VMware Player allows you to run entire operating systems in a virtual machine, which runs on top of Ubuntu or Windows. To the guest operating system (the one running inside the virtual machine), it appears as though it were running on its own PC. The host operating system runs the VMware Player, which provides the guest with things like network access. It can be downloaded for free from VMware.What is new in Version 6.0.0

This release of VMware Player adds the following new features and support.

VMware Player 6 Plus

With the release of VMware Player 6 VMware is introducing a commercial version of VMware Player called VMware Player 6 Plus. A license key for VMware Player can be purchased from the VMware online store -- http://store.vmware.com. Licensed versions of VMware Player can be used for commercial purposes, the warning text in the title bar will be suppressed and VMware Player 6 Plus can run restricted virtual machines. VMware Player is still available for Free for personal use. Please read the End User License Agreement for specific terms and conditions.

Installation Options

VMware Player installation has been enhanced with configuration settings to allow unattended installation of VMware Player using enterprise software configuration management tools. VMware Player now allows the EULA to be suppressed, a destination directory to be set, to opt out of the User Experience Improvement Program, Desktop and start menu shortcuts to not be created, the serial key to be passed automatically installed, the software update URL and a support contact URL to be configured.

Simplified UI Mode

Many of our customers would like to create virtual machines and provide them to their employees and students without enabling them to create virtual machines or modify VMware Player settings. VMware Player 6 includes a Simplified UI mode that can be set to hide these menu items.

This version of VMware Player includes VMware hardware Version 10. Hardware versions introduce new virtual hardware functionality and new features while enabling VMware to run legacy operating systems in our virtual machines. New features included in this hardware version:
16 vCPUs

Virtual Machines can now run with up to 16 virtual CPUs. This enables very processor intensive applications to be run in a virtual machine.

Note: Running Virtual Machines with 16 vCPUs requires that both your host and guest operating system support 16 logical processors. Your physical machine must have at least 8 cores with hyper-threading enabled to power on a virtual machine with this configuration.

8 Terabyte disks

Virtual machines can now include virtual disks greater than 2 Terabytes. Given the limitations of most operating systems to boot from disks greater than 2 Terabytes, These large disks are most useful as secondary drives for file storage.

Note: To use a disk greater than 2TB for a boot disk, your guest operating system would need to boot using EFI in order to read a GPT formatted disk which is required to access all of the sectors on a disk of this size. Additionally, the Buslogic controller is not capable of supporting a disk greater than 2TB.

USB Improvements

USB 3 Streams have been implemented to enable high speed transfer of files from USB 3 external storage devices that support this technology. For customers running on Workstation 10 on laptops with small hard disks, large data files, video files etc., can be stored on an external USB 3 storage device and accessed quickly from within the virtual machine.

Windows 8 is capable of detecting when it is being run from a solid state drive (SSD) and optimizes itself for this hardware. In Workstation 10, the guest operating system will be able to detect when the Virtual Machine Disk file is being stored on an SSD drive and the operating system can make the same optimizations when it is running in a virtual machine.

Many additional changes have been made to this Hardware Version including some performance improvements, power savings and compatibility with new processors. We have also made significant improvements in the startup time of VMware Player and in Windows boot time when running Windows virtual machines.

Expiring Virtual Machines

VMware has enhanced the capabilities of Restricted Virtual Machines to include the ability to expire on a specified date and time. This capability enables our customers to create virtual machines to be shared with employees, students, customers, contractors etc. that will run until their contract terminates, demo runs out or course ends.

These restricted and expiring virtual machines can be run in VMware Player 6 Plus but requires VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion Professional to create the Expiring Restricted virtual machine.